Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [36]
It was with these issues in mind that resources were shoveled toward Hoover in the days after the massacre. Dozens of new agents were hired and hustled into training classes. Guns were purchased and for the first time the men were shown how to use them—sort of. The FBI’s firearms-training program was initially a hit-and-miss affair. Agents in New York trained at one agent’s farm, shooting at pumpkins and soda bottles, while the Cincinnati office prevailed on local police to teach its men. In Chicago the SAC simply handed out pistols and said, “Here they are, boys. Learn how to shoot ’em.”3 “We had one .32 caliber pistol in the Kansas City office,” one agent remembered. “That was it. I was told one time to get the gun and some bullets and come to a particular office. When I got there, I found out the bullets wouldn’t even fit the gun.”4
This was the state of the army of raw young agents Hoover commanded in his mission to give the White House victories in its two lead cases in the War on Crime. The two investigations quickly became intertwined. On Thursday, June 22, five days after the massacre, Agent Gus Jones received a call from the St. Paul office. Agents there had searched the house Fred Barker had rented, suspecting it was linked to the Hamm kidnapping. They had no idea who lived there, but fingerprints taken from beer bottles at the house turned out to be Frank Nash’s. Hoover’s men scratched their heads: Was Nash somehow mixed up in the Hamm kidnapping?j
The same morning, the Kansas City office finally received Deafy Farmer’s telephone records. What they discovered changed the course of the investigation: A series of calls had been placed to an address, 6612 Edgevale, in Kansas City. Agents found the house empty. Agent Dwight Brantley, accompanied by the landlord and a Kansas City policeman, supervised the search.k In a desk drawer they found a pile of papers, mostly telephone and electric bills made out to the Vincent Moore family. In the cellar Brantley discovered empty beer bottles, as well as a two-gallon milk can filled with roofing nails.
An FBI fingerprint expert arrived to dust the house, and within hours the identification was made: Vincent Moore was in fact Verne Miller, as several agents familiar with Frank Nash had begun to suspect. A week later, on July 6, the Kansas City newspapers broke the story, naming Miller and two local hoodlums as the massacre gunmen. For the FBI, Miller became the most wanted man in the country.
Within days agents began to reel in people. Deafy Farmer and his wife were arrested on July 7 when they inexplicably returned to Joplin. Agents tracked Frances Nash to a relative’s home in Illinois and took her into custody. After several days of questioning, all three broke down and told everything: the flight from Hot Springs, the phone calls to Miller. But none could answer the questions the FBI needed answered most: Where was Miller now? And who were his partners?
Gus Jones put together a list of likely gunmen. It included Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, Alvin Karpis, and the Barker brothers. But Jones remained convinced Miller’s confederates were the men Nash had broken out of the Kansas prison: Harvey Bailey, the Oklahoma bandit Wilbur Underhill, and their fellow escapees. Bailey knew it, too, and went to extraordinary lengths to proclaim his innocence. One morning Jones opened a letter and was stunned to see it was from Bailey and his comrades. The letter claimed that Bailey and the others could not have carried out the massacre for the simple reason that they had robbed a bank at Black Rock, Arkansas, that same morning. We the undersigned are the perpetrators of the robbery, Bailey wrote. He affixed a collection of the gang’s fingerprints to bolster their case.
Seated in the FBI’s Kansas City office, Jones was still studying the letter on Thursday morning, July 20, when word came of a massive firefight